Abstract

The question of whether young children process items in memory in a related or discrete way was assessed in terms of the performance of 50 children (mean age: 2 years 10 months) assigned to either of two paired-associates tasks (or to either of two control tasks). The paired-associates tasks involved the same total set of items but in one contition (the “related” task) the response items for each child were from one “basic” category, while in the other condition (the “unrelated” task) the items were from different “basic” categories. (A control task reaffirmed this categorization of the items.) Children in the “related” task exhibited a significantly slower rate of performance than the children in the “unrelated” task (p < .01). The findings suggest that the former group experienced categorical “interference” in the acquisition and/or retrieval of the paired-associates items. (The second control task confirmed that any such interference was not due to an inability to perceptually discriminate the items from the same categories.)